Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

Grandparenting is the balancing act of having done it all before but having never really done it

Nanaville: Adventures in Grandparenting by Anna Quindlen

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It’s a complicated relationship, being a good grandparent, because it hinges on a series of other relationships… Because being a grandparent is determined by the relationship your child has with you, partly determined by the one a son or daughter has with his or her spouse, partly determined by the relationship you have with the person your child has chosen to have a child with. Like so many books I read I picked Nanaville: Adventures in Grandparenting off the shelves of my little town’s library […]

“I understand what you’re saying, and your comments are valuable, but I’m gonna ignore your advice.”

Fantastic Mr. Fox by Roald Dahl

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Maybe because I read it as an adult, this was only an okay reading experience for me. The only other Roald Dahl I read for the first time as an adult rather than a kid was The BFG, but I still loved that book. So maybe this is just a book that only works well for kids. Also, unlike a lot of Dahl’s books, it hasn’t aged very well. The basic gist of the plot is that Mr. Fox and his family live in a […]

L’Engle, I just wanna hug you. THANK. YOU.

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle

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Okay. Honesty time. I am trying to wrest a full cannonball from the jaws of defeat. Once I get this review written I’m at 48, I’m halfway through reading one book and 7/8 through tackling another on audio so that’s got me at 50 which is SO. CLOSE. So, I picked up Wrinkle in Time partially to get another one in the W column; however, I am hoping/trying to get my ten-year-old to read it (and the quintet) because duh, awesome. I threw the word […]

Gentle, spooky fun for sensitive, younger readers

Ghoulia and the Mysterious Visitor: Book #2 by Barbara Cantini

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While not technically about Halloween, this second Ghoulia book fits the bill for a slightly spooky story for younger readers.  My second grader loved the first book, Ghoulia: Making New Friends Can be Scary, which is about an undead girl wanting to make friends with the town children.  So when I learned that the sequel was out, it was an automatic choice for an ‘All Hallows Read’ gift. In the first book Ghoulia learned about Halloween and made friends.  This time there is a mystery […]

Child me would have LOVED this book, adult me thinks it’s pretty great: CBR Bingo – Birthday

Matilda by Roald Dahl

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When looking for which authors have a birthday to fit the bingo requirements, I discovered that Roald Dahl’s birthday is September 13th.  I’ve previously read a few other books by Dahl but had never read Matilda, so this seemed like a good time. When first published in 1988, I would have been eight years old and it would have been perfect for me to discover in about another two years.  However, it escaped notice and when the movie came out in 1996, I was entering my […]

“But what do I know? I’ve only been around 4.5 billion years or so.”

AstroNuts Mission One: the Plant Planet by Jon Scieszka, Steven Weinberg

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cbr11bingo – Birthday! Earth is now on the brink of being inhabitable, and she’s got no bones to pick about telling us why. Luckily, as she reveals to us in her narration of AstroNuts, NNASA (Not the National Aeronautics and Space Administration) has been planning for just such an event, secretly creating four super-space soldier animal hybrids in their secret laboratory under Mount Rushmore. Blasting off in Thomas Jefferson’s Nose Rocket, AstroWolf, LaserShark, SmartHawk, and StinkBug launch their mission of finding an unoccupied Earth-like planet […]



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